Your final project for this course will consist of three parts:

1. An 8-10 minute oral presentation on a topic of your choosing.
2. A brief research summary describing your findings.
3. An annotated bibliography of sources consulted about your topic.

Selecting a Topic and Creating a Research Question: Your first step is to select a topic you’d like to explore for your final project.  Your topic must be connected to our course theme, displacement.  You may choose a topic from the list provided, keeping in mind that all the topics on the list are broad and would need to be narrowed substantially, or you can feel free to come up with your own topic, provided you receive verbal approval from your professor.  Choose a topic that genuinely interests you!  Once you’ve chosen your topic, craft a research question about your topic that will guide your work.

Submit Topic Ideas: By 11 o’clock pm on Sunday, April 17^th, post three ideas for topics to our course blog.  Try to narrow your topic and express it in the form of a question.

Topic Approval: By Wednesday, April 20^th (our last session before Spring Break), you should have come to an agreement with Professor Sylvor about your topic.

Researching Your Topic: You will consult a minimum of four (4) sources in researching your topic. At least one of your sources must be a scholarly source!

Planning Your Presentation: The format of your presentation should be fairly straightforward, comprised of three parts:  What question was I hoping to answer about my topic?  What did I discover through my research? What conclusions can I draw on the basis of this research?  You are welcome to use visual aids and the technology available in the classroom during your presentation, but keep in mind that I am more interested in the quality of your ideas than in any fancy bells and whistles!  You may use notes when delivering your presentation, but you may NOT read from a prepared text or script.

Presentation Schedule: Presentations will take place on May 11^th, May 16^th, and May 18th in class and should be around 8-10 minutes long.  We will be pulling numbers from a hat to determine the order of our presentations.  You are welcome to trade numbers with a classmate as long as you inform me of the change.

Research Summary: Your research summary should be 5-6 pages long and should follow the format of your presentation.  Begin with a description of your research project.  What question or questions were you hoping to answer?  What did you learn through your research?  What conclusions can you draw on the basis of your research?  What surprises did your research yield?  What questions are you left with?

Annotated Bibliography: You will be preparing and submitting an annotated bibliography of all the sources you used in preparing your presentation. See handout titled “What Is an Annotated Bibliography?” for guidance.  Bibliographies and Research Summaries should be uploaded to turnitin.com as a single file by 11pm on Friday, May 20th. Late submissions will not be accepted.

Displacement Topic Ideas

Anything related to immigration:

Immigration from a particular place at a particular time

A particular aspect of the immigrant experience – immigration during childhood,   for       example.

Immigrant labor

Experience of being an illegal immigrant

Something historic

Immigrant neighborhoods in NYC

Immigration as issue in current presidential race

Anything related to topic of refugees:

Experience of Jewish refugees in WWII

Life in contemporary refugee camps

America’s role in current refugee crisis

Refugees adjusting to life in Europe

Moral/ethical dilemmas raised by issue

Social media and current refugee crisis

Adoption

Experiences of moving that aren’t related to immigration – what does it mean to start somewhere new?

Migrant workers

Gender and Displacement – Is being transgender a form of displacement?

Language and Displacement – bilingualism, language and education

Nursing Homes (the elderly and displacement)

Amish practice of Rumschpringen

Space exploration

Experience of field anthropologists

School integration

Eviction

Convents, Monasteries, and other forms of escaping the secular world

Siblings and psychological displacement

Adjustment to the armed forces

Homelessness

What Is An Annotated Bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is a list of all of the sources consulted in your research, but unlike regular bibliographies, an annotated bibliography includes a brief description of each work consulted (approx.150 words.)

When writing your annotation, the complete citation should always come first and the annotation follows. The citation format will follow the MLA 2009 guidelines.   You can find detailed instructions about the MLA citation guidelines in your Little, Brown handbook, if you have one.  They are also available online.

Your description of the work cited should include the following:

1. The purpose of the work
2. A summary of its content
3. For what type of audience the work is written
4. Its relevance to your topic
5. Any special or unique features about the material

Sample Entries:

Greene, Stuart. “Mining Texts in Reading to Write.” Journal of Advanced   Composition 12.1 (1992): 151-67. Print.

This article works from the assumption that reading and writing inform each other, particularly in the matter of rhetorical constructs. Greene introduces the concept of “mining texts” for rhetorical situations when       reading with a sense of authorship. Considerations for what can be mined include language, structure, and context, all of which can be useful depending upon the writer’s goals. The article provides some practical methods that complement Doug Brent’s ideas about reading as invention.

Murray, Donald M. Read to Write: A Writing Process Reader. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1987. Print.

Murray’s book deals more specifically with the ways writers read other writers, particularly the ways in which writers read themselves. Read to Write provides a view of drafting and revising, focusing on the way a piece of writing evolves as an author takes the time to read and criticize his or her own work. Moreover, the book spotlights some excellent examples of professional writing and displays each writer’s own comments on his/her own creations, in effect allowing the student reader to learn (by reading) the art of rereading and rewriting as exemplified by famous authors.

Newell, George E. “The Effects of Between-Draft Responses on Students’            Writing and Reasoning About Literature.” Written Communication 11.3 (1994): 311-47. Print.

This study reflects the advantage of teacher responses on student papers. When reflected upon as “dialogue” questions to the student, these      comments can lead to further interpretation and deeper understanding of a text. Newell found that responses which prompted students to work from their initial drafts brought about more final papers than teacher responses that led them away from their initial drafts with “directive” remarks.

Read through all of your classmates posts about the refugee crisis.  Choose a post that seems to share something with your post and comment on it.  Your comment should respond to the content of your classmate’s original post, and it should describe the connection you see between it and your original post.  If you are responding to a post that contains an image, be sure that your post addresses the visual components of the post as well as the words! What do the photographs bring to the story that words alone might not convey? Be specific!

Homework must be completed by 12:00 on Wednesday!  If you did not complete the homework for Monday, you can still receive credit for Wednesday’s homework by commenting on one of your classmates’ posts.

Read “Revising Attitudes” by Brock Dethier, and complete the following:

1. List three ideas about revision that you took away from this piece.
2. On pages 2-3, Dethier describes eight different forms of “Resistance to Revision.” Which of these best describes your attitude toward the prospect of revising your work? Explain your choice.
3. Which essay have you decided to revise? Why?
4. What do you hope to achieve in this revision? (Don’t say “a better grade!”)
5. What advice do you have for yourself (or your peers) as you begin this process?

In order to continue our investigation of the current refugee crisis, please complete one of the following tasks BEFORE our class session on Monday:

–Go to the blog  Humans of New York.  The creator of this blog photographed and recorded the stories of refugees he met in Greece and Iran.  Look in the archives for September 26th – October 6th, 2015 and December 3rd – December 15th, 2015.  Choose a photograph and accompanying narrative that you find particularly compelling or interesting, and post it to our blog, together with a short explanation of what led you to make this choice.

–Do a search of articles related to some aspect of the refugee crisis, and choose an article to share with the class.  It could be a newspaper, magazine, or other media news story or editorial piece.  Post the story to our class blog, together with a short explanation of why it captured your interest and why you think it is worth passing on.  Limit your search to publications in the last 12 months.

–Profile someone you know who is (or was) a refugee.  (Think about the definition we used in class.)  Post a photograph of him/her to our class blog, together with a short description of his/her refugee story.   Where is he/she from? Why did he/she find it necessary to leave? What were the circumstances of his/her departure?  How did he/she end up in the U.S.?

As we’ve discussed, you will be revising either  your personal essay or your literary analysis.

Revisions are due as a hard copy in class on Wednesday, April 20th.  No late papers will be accepted.

For this assignment, you will be working with the same text and the same topic as you did in your original paper.  In order to receive credit for this assignment, you will need to engage in substantive revision of your original essay.  This means far more than simply addressing the corrections that I marked on your original essay; it means creating a new paper that meets your goals more successfully than the original did.

In preparation for our next unit, please print out the following article, and bring it with you to class on Monday, April 4th.

“The Refugee Crisis: 9 Questions You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask”

Building on the posts that you did about examples in popular culture that use the Superman/Fresh Prince model and the conversation we had in class about the selections you made, write an analysis of the show/movie/video you’ve selected. Your analysis should be 500 words or more.  This assignment is due in class on Monday, April 4th.  No late submissions will be accepted.   Your analysis will, of course, be in paragraph form, but be sure that you address the following:

–Provide a concise summary of the premise of your show.  Be sure to include its genre

–What is the relationship between the “outsider” and the “host community”?  How do they differ?

–What function does the “outsider” serve in the “host community”?

–What happens as a result of the displacement?

–What underlying meaning can you derive from your text? Is it offering any kind of cultural critique or commentary?

Use these questions to help guide you in creating your own analysis.  Feel free to address issues I haven’t raised here.

Today in class, we watched two short clips from Superman  and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  Both clips followed roughly the same basic structure.  In each, the son is sent away from home by his parents and finds himself in a new and unfamiliar place.  In both narratives, the protagonist has to figure out how to manage in a place where he does not fit in.  Your homework for Monday is to find a piece of popular culture that follows this basic “fish out of water” structure.  It could be a tv show, movie, song, video, cartoon, etc….   All that the designation “popular culture” means is that is it designed for a mass audience.  Once you’ve chosen your “text,” post a short, representative clip from it or a link to it here on the blog, together with a description of the text and an explanation of how you see it conforming to the model we saw in Superman and The Fresh Prince.  If you have any questions about this assignment, please contact me.

4-5 pages, typed, and double spaced

Draft Due: In Class – Wednesday, March 16^th

Essay Due: Uploaded to turnitin.com by 11 pm on Sunday, March 20^th

In a thoughtful, focused analytical essay exploring one of three short stories we’ve read (“Unaccustomed Earth,” “On the Rainy River,” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”), respond to one of the following prompts:

1. In each of the three stories, we encounter characters that are in transition. Choose one character and explore the meaning of his/her transition. What is the significance of what happens to him/her over the course of the narrative?
2. Use the title of your story as a lens through which to approach the story’s main concerns. What, in your view, is the central significance of the title. How does it instruct us to read the story?
3. We come to understand ourselves better through our relationships with others. Each of the stories you’ve read features an important encounter between two people. Choose one of these relationships and explore its significance. (Ruma and her father, Tim O’Brien and Elroy Berdahl, Dina and Heidi)
4. Discuss the use of perspective in your story. What insight does the narrative point of view give us into the characters’ psychological or emotional makeup? What questions does it raise? What do we learn from the relationship between a character’s internal life and the way he/she chooses to reveal himself/herself to others?

These prompts are your starting points. Once you have chosen a prompt and a text, find a way to articulate your topic in the form of a question.  (It can be very simple, like “What happens to the father/daughter relationship over the course of “Unaccustomed Earth?”)  Then think about the body of your paper as an attempt to answer the question you’ve posed.  Once you’ve written your draft and figured out what it is that you have to say in response to your question, you may find that it makes sense to go back and rewrite your introductory paragraph in a way that lets the reader know where the paper is headed and what your central claim

Thought you might be interested in this photography project: Your Veil is a Battleground.  Take a look, and tell me what you think!